“Living in those boxes”: Archive Stories from Researching W. E. B. Du Bois
In 2019, historian David Levering Lewis described his early research excursions into W. E. B. Du Bois’s archives at UMass and at Fisk University in the 1980s as “living in those boxes.” By boxes, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Du Bois biographer meant delving deeply into Hollinger archival containers, acid-free homes to thousands of Du Bois’s manuscripts, letters, and miscellaneous papers. Living in those boxes, Lewis further reflected, signaled an archival immersion into Du Bois’s life and times, the excavation work of historical research. Adapting Lewis’s apt phrase about following paper trails and building intellectual research foundations for analyzing and assessing Du Bois’s thought and legacy, this presentation chronicles my own experiences of “living in those boxes” as the Du Bois Center’s Senior Research Fellow: not just working in Du Bois’s papers in Amherst and Nashville, but also exploring archival collections of other Du Bois family members as well as friends, colleagues, and comrades. I will share archive stories about fascinating discoveries that connect the historical dots of Du Bois’s life through delightful serendipity. Also, I will comment on some recent archival dead ends, where the absence of documents or artifacts does not foreclose analysis but creates the intellectual conditions to ask more probing questions. To illustrate these accounts of both archival absence and abundance, my presentation concludes by chronicling the history of a 1957 ceremony honoring Du Bois at the Schomburg Collection, which will feature the unveiling of a newly digitized audio recording of Du Bois’s lecture at this Harlem event.
Phillip Luke Sinitiere received his Ph.D. in American history at the University of Houston in 2009. Currently, he is a professor of history and humanities at the College of Biblical Studies, a predominately African American school located in Houston, Texas’s Mahatma Gandhi District. In addition, Sinitiere is the Senior Research Fellow at UMass Amherst’s W. E. B. Du Bois Center. He also serves on the editorial board of Global Black Thought, a brand-new peer reviewed journal launched by the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS). A scholar of American religious history and African American Studies, Sinitiere’s latest book is Forging Freedom in W. E. B. Du Bois’s Twilight Years: No Deed but Memory (University Press of Mississippi, 2023). At present, he is finishing a book on the history of W. E. B. Du Bois’s archives (under contract with UMass Press), and a volume of scholarly essays on the work of Shirley Graham Du Bois (under contract with the University of Pennsylvania Press).
Location: W. E. B. Du Bois Library, Floor 22, Room 2220, W. E. B. Du Bois Center